Spiritual Antithesis

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Spiritual Successor's Evil Twin, Spiritual Antithesis is referencing an earlier work by using similar characters and themes, but going in a completely different direction. Often set at the opposite end of Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. May serve as a Deconstruction (or Reconstruction if the original work was a deconstruction itself) or Stealth Parody of the original work.

Generally seen as a Take That against the original work, and closely related to Satire. May involve Whole-Plot Reference.

Of course, nothing prevents a work from being the Spiritual Antithesis of one work and the Spiritual Successor of another at the same time, which may often result in said work being X Meets Y or This Is Your Premise On Drugs.

Genres that play this role to each other:

• Cosmic Horror Story and Lovecraft Lite
• Heroic Fantasy & High Fantasy and Low Fantasy
• Standard Fantasy Setting and New Weird
• Cyberpunk & Post Cyber Punk and a little-known Punk Punk genre actually called "Punk Punk" that has more realistic technology and characters loyally working for the sorts of corporations that Cyberpunk and Post Cyber Punk protagonists rebel against.
• Deconstruction and Reconstruction

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Tiger and Bunny might be this for Darker Than Black - both are takes on Superhero genre that have superhumans glowing blue while using their powers, but former has much more idealistic take than latter, which is much more cynical and preffers Not Wearing Tights and antiheroic variety. Neither works go into extremes - just like Darker Than Black stays on the cynical side but acknowledges existence of idealism, Tiger and Bunny is very optimistic, but has few shades of cynicism on it.
• Code Geass and Gundam 00 are this towards Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny - directors of both didn't liked how SEED and Destiny turned out and dedicated their series to deconstruct several elements that annoyed them.
• Yoshiyuki Tomino likes to follow up his dark and depressing series with their opposites - Zambot 3 was followed by Daitarn 3, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam by Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, and Space Runaway Ideon by Combat Mecha Xabungle.
• Gurren Lagann was this to Neon Genesis Evangelion (bonus points for being made by the same people) and its own Spiritual Predecessor Space Runaway Ideon.
  • FLCL is another Spiritual Antithesis to Evangelion, also created by the same people - according to rumors, many people who just finished working on End of Evangelion felt down and wanted to create something crazy and optimistic to cheer themselves up.
  • You may also say that Gao Gai Gar, first reconstruction of Super Robot genre after Evangelion was another one of these for it - it celebrated and embraced the same tropes Evangelion criticized or outright rejected.
• Makoto Shinkai's last two works have strong contrast with his two previous works
  • Voices of a Distant Star and Five Centimeters Per Second - while former is about love, that survives despite great (as in, cosmic) distance between two people, latter says that not every love can be that strong and sometimes separated people grow apart from each other.
  • The Place Promised in Our Early Days and Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below - former says that love can prevail and unite people against all odds, but latter reminds you that there is one barrier that nothing can break - death.

Comic Books

• Switchblade Honey is this to Star Trek - it shows a future where the exploration of space is handled by a bunch of insane egomaniacs, which leads to a war with a much more powerful enemy, which humanity is losing. Heroic idealists, who would become great heroes of Starfleet in Star Trek, here end up in prison for opposing the corrupted system.
• Warren Ellis in the afterword of Black Summer contrasted it with Civil War, saying that Mark Millar's event shows watered down version of superheroes coming in conflict with the goverment, while he wanted to show in Black Summer what he thinks would really happen.
• Warren Ellis must love this trope - when Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross created Marvels, deconstructing but still idealistic potrayal of Marvel Universe, Ellis wrote Ruins - depressing Alternate Universe where everything that could go wrong,worse that you can imagine - that is generally seen as Marvels' Evil Twin. When Busiek made sequel to Marvels, Ellis respond with Ghost Boxes - compilation of alternate Universes where X Men failed to stop the threat from his Astonishing X-Men series, each more depressing that previous one.

Fan Fiction

• Party Of None is a reconstruction of Cupcakes, in that it actively avoids using excessive violence to make a point that dark fics don't need it to be scary.

Film

• D.W. Griffith was accused of racism in The Birth of a Nation, so he made the anti-racism movie Intolerance afterwards.
• Steven Spielberg produced Poltergeist at the same time as he was making ET the Extraterrestrial to contrast each other. He described ET as the Suburban Dream… While poltergeist was the Suburban Nightmare.

Literature

• His Dark Materials is this to Narnia. Pullman isn't trying to hide his hate for Lewis' series, so it was probably intentional.
• Lord of the Flies is this towards the children's book Coral Island. Coral Island has young boys living on an island after their ship's catastrophe and working together to fight "the savages". Godling, having an issue with racist undertones and savagery being presented as an outside threat and not something that lies in human nature, wrote a book in which young boys end up abandoning their civilized ways and trying to kill each other. Ironically, another writer, Robert A. Heinlein, took issue with that portrayal and wrote Tunnel In The Sky, which served as an opposite to Lord of the Flies - boys end up on an alien world and work together for their survival. Some try to go the same way as characters from Golding's book, but end up quickly killed. Insu-Pu is another spiritual opposite to Lord of the Flies.
• Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart in response to the old classic, Heart of Darkness. He found the latter to be one of the most racist things he'd ever read and wanted to show that native Africans were not, as previously believed, total savages.
• Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None as an opposite philosophical story to the New Testament.
• The Black Company is this for High Fantasy genre - if one assumes that typical works of High Fantasy are propaganda of the winners, then this is closer to how those events really looked like.
• Starship Troopers (the novel) gets this treatment a lot, especially in the 1970s and 80s, with works like Haldemann's Forever War and Steakley's Armor being the two most blatant. Even Drake's Hammer's Slammers could probably be listed.
  • And Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.
• John Sladek's satirical Roderick series features a robot who views a corrupt world through innocent eyes. Sladek then turned the idea on its head in the novel Tik-Tok: the world is just as corrupt, so its robot Anti-Hero decides to exploit it by being even more corrupt.
• Richard K Morgan intends A Land Fit for Heroes to be this to The Lord of the Rings.

Live Action TV

• Blakes Seven was meant to be Star Trek turned on its head: the symbol of the fascist Terran Federation was even the symbol of the Federation Starfleet turned 90 degrees to the right.
  • Farscape is another anti-Star Trek space opera - like Blakes Seven, it featured a group of scruffy fugitives as the main characters, alternately fighting or fleeing the clean, well-dressed military.
  • Also, with the 2000's Battlestar Galactica, Ronald D. Moore was pretty much able to do everything he had ever wanted to do on Star Trek but wasn't allowed.
• The Quantum Leap episode "Lee Harvey Oswald" (demonstrating that Oswald could have and most likely did act alone) was made in response to the Oliver Stone film JFK.
• Firefly's setting is deliberately a change of pace from the standard Space Western or Wagon Train to The Stars where the main characters are backed by The Federation or some major organization.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40000 is this for the idealistic Space Opera genre as a whole, especially Star Trek, following the principle that Humans Are Special and showing them living peacefully with other races and defeating various space evils. In contrast, The Empire of Man is utterly racist, and its position at the galactic power table was paid for with the blood of millions of humans.
• Paranoia is this for the more common type of game in which the P Cs are generally expected to work together toward common goals.

Video Games

• The Iranian students who made Rescue Nuke Scientist (in which the player controls Iranian soldiers rescuing captured nuclear engineers from Israel) said it was meant as a response to Assault On Iran (in which the player controls American soldiers attacking an Iranian nuclear weapons facility). The makers of Assault On Iran responded to that with Payback In Iraq, which even includes characters and events from Rescue. And said they hoped the makers of Rescue Nuke Scientist would respond again.
• Gears of War and Call of Duty are different ways of taking the shooter genre (Gears being about taking cover and COD making both sides weak to bullets), seemingly as a counterpart to the radical influence of Halo.